Tag Archives: arts

The Medway Broadside launches at Poco Loco at 3:00 this Sunday afternoon (28th November). All are welcome, and there will be live acoustic music from the astonishing talents Didi Bergman, Joe Cottiss and Theatre Royal.

But what is the Medway Broadside?

It’s a community sourced publication, written and produced by volunteers, that focuses on local issues and leans towards the grass roots arts. The aim is to produce a print run once a quarter and to have a website to complement that. There is no gloss, no advertising and no clutter or careeerism.

Medway Eyes would like to be honest and open and declare its interests here. The editorial team is comprised of two Medway Eyes trustees. Just so you know.

That said, anybody can offer a contribution to the Broadside as long as it is not politically parmesan, simply by writing to editor@themedwaybroadside.com. We’d urge you to do so. We all have our views and our take on things, after all. Everybody deserves a voice, particularly in a local environment where issues like city status are at the forefront of public debate.

Come along. Check it out. Embrace the alternative. We’d love to see you and to listen to you. In the meantime, here’s a word from one who knew…

Desolation Row is an ongoing collaborative multimedia project that is Medway Eyes’ response to the regeneration that is taking place in Medway despite a lack of sufficient public consultation.

We believe that respectful management and preservation of a place’s heritage is the key to a successful regeneration, yet we have seen the Theatre Royal demolished, Aveling and Porter groundlessly condemned, and Sun Pier left to ruin. The council can see Sun Pier from their plush new offices. We’ve asked them when it is going to be fixed. We have not received a reply.

We also observe that regeneration in other areas has opened up waterfronts. Not here though. The waterfront will be covered in flats and closed off from the town by a bus station in the wrong place.

Sunday 15th March saw an assortment of creative locals – musicians, photographers, film makers, writers, artists and designers traipsing around the forgotten stretch of the Chatham/Rochester Hight Street. The plan for the shoot was to make it up as we went along and then go to the pub.

Our only disappointment was that the Bob Dylan which had been stencilled onto the side of the Jade Garden (by Redlock, we subsequently discovered) had been painted over. A real shame as it was the only thing breaking up the ghastly shade of Dull that the rest of the building was painted in. Anyway, thanks to our vigilant photographers, we’d heard of a second Bob Dylan painted on Bath Hard Lane. We found Bob to be wonderfully photogenic and a
real hit with the ladies. We did the second Desolation Row shoot two weeks later. We filmed some interviews and singing by the river and drank more beer.

Unfortunately, there was one thing missing; Bob Dylan. The second Bob had been painted over too. He’d been stencilled onto a filled-in railway arch on a scrubby bit of wasteland, so who would paint over it and why? Given that other graffiti had been left behind, including an indecipherable, artistically devoid tag about six feet high, we could come to only one conclusion; the council had been out with the whitewash again. It seems we were right, too. Medway Eyes photographer, Garry Jenkins was in the papes again for the second time in a week. The caption beneath his photo read “This Dylan image has since been painted over by council workers”. While they were at it, the council painted over another historic piece of graffiti; a tribute to Thee Milkshakes which had adorned the wall by the railway bridge for more than twenty-five years. You see, the council can’t have the general public seeing validity in vandalism. How will it manipulate us into believing that Medway needs regeneration if the crappy tags have to compete with artistic graffiti? So they painted over Bob and the Milkshakes leaving the rubbish behind in the name of making Medway a “cleaner and safer place”. The council whitewash is not for our safety, it is a tool of censorship, used to blunt our senses to its persistent cultural vandalism.

We’re letting this project find its own path and allowing it to take as long as it needs to to record change. There will be video, music and maybe a book. It is possible, but unlikely, that a physical gallery exhibition will accompany this project, so don’t be upset if there are no postcards of the hanging. The chances are we’ll manage another gig.

Medway Eyes is an independent, informal artists’ collective from the Medway Towns in south-east England in the UK. This blog is where we publicise the events we put on, serving as a one stop shop for press and public alike.

We’ll be featuring a photographer each month, and this month it’s piX1966. Check her out.

We’ll be adding a series of posts about our activities over the past year or so, just as soon as we’ve redesigned our website. After that, we’ll be looking forward and keeping you up to date with news and events.